Your Afternoon Girlfriends: Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair

Frequent visitors to these parts know how much we love — loved? No, love; it’s forever, even if the show is not — USA’s Playing House, which they co-created and in which they co-starred. It’s a warm and funny three-season love story about best friends, and the family they make, and how those bonds are as strong as anything romantic (a doubly powerful statement considering one love interest is Keegan Michael Key). Season three even reflected St. Clair’s real-life cancer diagnosis and the ways Parham immediately stepped up and partnered her through it. I’m so sad they won’t be making new episodes, but the silver lining — I hope — is that it frees them up to create and star in other stuff together that might get a bigger platform and make them omnipresent.

Anyhoo: Seeing them made me feel warm, fuzzy things about the girlfriends in my life. The ones who dried my breakup tears, coached me into conversations I needed artificial guts to have, got me greasy food during my hangovers, drove my kids to a school function so I could deal with a contractor and a damaged ceiling, rescued me when I was home alone with twins at varying stages of difficulty and needed a dose of sanity… They propped me up when Dad died, flew cross-country to his funeral — Jess helped bring the then-22-month old beans, one of whom apparently fed her olives on the plane, which was… caring? — and came to keep me company when I was laid up post-IVF and couldn’t sit up for three days, or while I recovered from a miscarriage. And that’s just the sad stuff; blessedly, there’s been exponentially more moments where they bring joy, simply by being themselves and letting me bask in their presence. We’ve seen each other at our worst and best and every phase in between, and some of us have been married that way longer than Kevin and I have been. Best friends can be the loves of your life.

And so, with a day of thanks looming, let’s make the comments section a tribute to the BFFs in your life, male or female. After all, Fug Nation is our ride-or-die; we want to celebrate yours, too. We’re thankful for you and for them.